Kavalam Madhava Panikkar Quotes

It was the devout hope of Macaulay… and of many others, that the diffusion of new learning among the higher classes would see the dissolution of Hinduism and the widespread acceptance of Christianity. The missionaries were of the same view, and they entered the education field with enthusiasm, providing schools and colleges in many parts of India where education in the Christian Bible was compulsory for Hindu students. The middle classes accepted Western education with avidity and willingly studied Christian scriptures, but neither the dissolution of Hindu society so hopefully predicted nor the conversion of the intellectuals so devoutly hoped for showed any sign of materialization. On the other hand, Hinduism assimilated the new learning, and the effects were soon visible all over India in a revival of a universalistic religion based on the Vedanta.

Unfortunately, before his mission could be completed, Burlinghame died in St Petersburg. His mission was important from two points of view. In the first place he was able to secure assurances both from America and England that they would deal only with the Central Government at Peking, and the danger that existed at one time of the Powers directly negotiating with viceroys and thus securing a dissolution of the central authority on which British mercantile opinion was insistent was avoided. The Shanghai merchants' refrain at this time was `when will the Foreign Office realize that China was a confederation of many States?'

[The Treaty that followed] “provided for the suspension of official examinations for five years in towns where foreigners had been molested - a device meant to give a chance to the missionary educated young men and Christians to be employed in service…”

Legislature protected the right of converts to their share in Hindu joint families, and High Court decisions enabled converts to blackmail their wives to follow them into the fold of their new religion. The Government also encouraged the missionaries to work among the backward tribes.”

A violent propaganda campaign was launched by Carey and his associates against Hinduism in Bengal which seemed to them to be in a state of dissolution. But Hindu orthodoxy reacted vigorously and Lord Minto felt obliged to prohibit such propaganda in Calcutta. Minto's letter to the Court of Directors is worth quoting: `Pray read the miserable stuff addressed specially to the Gentoos (Hindus) in which . . . the pages are filled with hell fire, and hell fire and with still hotter fire, denounced against a whole race of men, for believing in the religion which they were taught by their fathers and mothers. . .

The effects of Asian contacts on Europe, though considerably less, cannot be considered insignificant. The growth of capitalism in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in itself a profound and revolutionary change, is intimately connected with the expansion of European trade and business into Asia. The political development of the leading Western European nations during this period was also related to their exploitation of their Asian possessions and the wealth they derived from the trade with and government of their Eastern dependencies. Their material life, as reflected in clothing, food, beverages, etc., also bears permanent marks of their Eastern contacts. We have already dealt briefly with the penetration of cultural, artistic and philosophical influences, though their effects cannot still be estimated. Unlike the Rococo movement of the eighteenth century, the spiritual and cultural reactions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are deeper, and have not yet fully come to the surface. The influence of Chinese literature and of Indian philosophical thought, to mention only two trends which have become important in recent years, cannot be evaluated for many years to come. Yet it is true, as T. S. Eliot has stated, that most modern poets in Europe have in some measure been influenced by the literature of China. Equally the number of translations of the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads, which have been appearing every year, meant not for Orientalists and scholars but for the educated public, and the revival of interest in the religious experience of India, are sufficient to prove that a penetration of European thought by Oriental influences is now taking place which future historians may consider to be of some significance.

The commander of a Spanish galleon which was driven ashore spoke of Spanish power and recounted to the local daimyo who had salvaged the vessel and claimed the cargo the glories and prowess of the Conquistadores in a boastful manner. Hideyoshi's suspicious mind, already aware of Portuguese action in the East, ordered the arrest of all Spaniards in the country and had them crucified in Nagasaki as spies.

The monarch of Siam assumed the title of the Defender of the Buddhist Faith in imitation of the British King's title. The conservative but generally enlightened policy followed by the monarchy during the critical period between 1870 and 1920 had the effect of getting Siam through the transition without violent tumult and a disorganization of society, so that in the period following the First [World] War she was enabled to recover her natural independence in full by the gradual abolition, through negotiations, of the rights of extraterritoriality which the foreign nations possessed.

It is unnecessary for our pupose to go into the sordid details of the Company's early administration of their Diwani of Bengal. In brief, it may be stated that for a decade the whole power of the organized State was directed to a single purpose ‑ plunder. It was a robber State that had come into existence, and Richard Becher, a servant of the Company, wrote to his masters in London on May 24, 1769, as follows: `It must give pain to an Englishman to have reason to think that since the accession of the Company to the Diwani the condition of the people of this country has been worse than it was before .... This fine country, which flourished under the most despotic and arbitrary government, is verging towards ruin.'...

St Xavier had come to the East representing both the Pope ‑ as a Legate ‑ and the King as an inspector of missions. As missionary work was a State enterprise charged to the Crown's revenues in Portugal, this identification of national, interests with religious activity should not be a matter of surprise.

One strange act, which was precursor of many such in Chinese history, may be noted. The Chinese Repository, XI, 68o, records: 'Sept. 3. A party of British officers and others acting the barbarian in right good earnest visited the porcelain tower. They went (so the Abbots testified) with hatchets and chisels and hammers and cut off and carried away large masses doing no inconsiderable damage.' A Chinese observer of this desecration noted that `the English barbarians frequently ascended the pagoda . . . took away several glazed tiles, which is indeed detestable in the extreme'. William Dallas Barnard even excuses this act of desecration as 'a not unnatural desire to possess specimens or relics'. This inveterate tendency to desecrate and destroy was repeated again and again in European relations with China, in the Summer Palace in 1860, in Tientsin in 1870, and in Peking itself in 1900.

The success of the missions need not have been so meagre but for certain factors which may be discussed now. In the first place, the missionary brought with him an attitude of moral superiority and a belief in his own exclusive righteousness. The doctrine of the monopoly of truth and revelation, as claimed by William of Aubruck to Batu Khan when he said 'he that believeth not shall be condemned by God', is alien to the Hindu and Buddhist mind. To them the claim of any sect that it alone possesses the truth and others shall be `condemned' has always seemed unreasonable. Secondly the association of Christian missionary work with aggressive imperialism introduced political complications. National sentiment could not fail to look upon missionary activity as inimical to the country's interests. That diplomatic pressure, extra‑territoriality and sometimes support of gun‑boats had been resorted to in the interests of the foreign missionaries could not be easily forgotten. Thirdly, the sense of European superiority which the missionaries perhaps unconsciously inculcated produced also its reaction. Even during the days of unchallenged European political supremacy no Asian people accepted the cultural superiority of the West. The educational activities of the missionaries stressing the glories of European culture only led to the identification of the work of the missions with Western cultural aggression.

The feudal rulers of that part of Japan were anxious at that time to attract Portuguese vessels to the harbours mainly with the object of strengthening themselves against other feudal Lords. They realized instinctively the close connection between the foreign powers across the seas and the missionaries who had come to preach the new religion.

In fact, in the plantation areas conditions amounting to slavery were re‑established by the planters with the acquiescence of the Government.Some idea of the misery to which the population of these areas was reduced by this system of merciless exploitation in the interests of British capital may be gained from the Bengal Indigo Commission's Report and from some of the literature of the period. Nil Darpan or the Mirror of Indigo, a Bengali drama, created a sensation by throwing a little light on this dark corner of Britain's action in India, and the reaction in official circles was so great that a European missionary, Mr Long, who translated and published it in English, was fined and imprisoned. During the whole of this period, in fact till the rise of nationalism after the Great War, conditions in plantations were of a kind which showed the worst features of European relations with Asia.

With the separation of the Pakistan Provinces, the main sites of what was known as the Indus Valley Civilisation have gone to Pakistan. It is clearly of the utmost importance that archaeological work in connection with this early period of Indian history must be continued in India. A preliminary examination has shown that the centre of the early civilisation was not Sind or the Indus Valley but the desert area in Bikaner and Jaisalmer through which the ancient Saraswati flowed into the Gulf of Kutch at one time.